Google Webmaster Tools Cleans Up Navigation & More

Google has announced a clean up of Google Webmaster Tools, where they reorganized the left hand navigation menu, added a gears icon for quicker access to administrative functions and added a new search appearance pop up feature.

New Navigation:

The new Google Webmaster Tools navigation is now organized differently to make it sync with the stages of the Google flow.

Crawl Section is where you will see information about how Google discovers and crawls content. In here are your crawl stats, crawl errors, any blocked URLs by crawling, Sitemaps, URL parameters, and the Fetch as Google feature.

Google Index section will keep track of how many of your pages are the Google index and how Google understands that content. Here you can monitor the overall indexed counts for your site (Index Status), see what keywords Google found on your pages (Content Keywords), or request to remove URLs from the search results.

Search Traffic will show you how your pages are doing in the search results. Such as how people find your site (Search Queries), who’s recommended your site (Links to Your Site), and see a sample of pages from your site that have incoming links from other internal pages.

Search Appearance will mark up your pages to help Google understand your content better during indexing and potentially influence how your pages appear in the search results. This includes the Structured Data dashboard, Data Highlighter, Sitelinks, and HTML Improvements.

Search Appearance Overlay:

For webmasters who have no clue how Google looks or works, Google made it very clear by adding this overlay or pop up explaining the Google search results page. You can access it by clicking on question mark icon next to the Search Appearance menu in the side navigation.

It basically describes the results page and UI features on that page:

New Administrative Gears Box:

I love this, it is something that always took too many clicks to get to. Now it is available at the top right of all the pages within Webmaster Tools.

There has not been much discussion around this update because there have been no major technical features added to Google Webmaster Tools with this release. It is mostly just a cosmetic change.